Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf retains power to astonish

Iain Sinclair’s great new production shows that Edward Albee’s play still has ­astonishing power.

Darren Gilshenan and Genevieve Lemon in Who's Afraid of Virgina Woolf.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf came out in 1962, a few years after Eric Berne developed the popular psychology therapy called transactional analysis, which sought to explain and treat emotional problems by exploring the interactions between people. The play was ­discussed in textbooks, so powerful was Edward Albee’s almost forensic dramatic analysis of the relationship games played by his warring couple.

Iain Sinclair’s great new production shows that it still has ­astonishing power. A large part of that power lies in magnificent performances by Darren Gilshenan and Genevieve Lemon.

We watch the long night of ­increasingly vicious games Martha and George play with each other and with their two young guests with fascinated horror.

Their battles start off cheerfully enough. Lemon’s vulgar hilarity and Gilshenan’s apparently bemused detachment and smooth style seem harmless at first. The two characters are drunk at the outset, after all, after the party they have just come from. They seem to be doing it for fun. But as they goad each other to find new ways of hurting each other the mood gets increasingly savage.

In these performances it is ­always clear that George and Martha love, or at least need, each other, but the games they play are so deeply ingrained in their relationship that they cannot stop, until the shattering climax and the oddly peaceful denouement in which they may or may not have come to some kind of weary resolution.

Gilshenan’s George is quiet, slightly shambling, with brief and quickly suppressed hurt outbursts of protest and anger as Martha provokes him. His apparent ­detachment only serves to stress the strength that underlies his character, a man determined to end all this. He plays George’s wit and eloquence extraordinarily well, but with a hinted-at tenderness that emerges at the end.

Lemon’s Martha is loud and brash, given to extravagant ­gestures of defiance and sudden collapses into vulnerability. The wonderful speech in which ­Martha reveals her deep love of ­George and her understanding of what has been going on between them for so long is beautifully and movingly done.

Brandon McClelland and Claire Lovering, as the young ­couple, Nick and Honey, are also very good. These two are victims but they also represent the future — he an ambitious self-serving young academic and she a privileged young woman trapped in a marriage much more loveless than George and Martha’s. It rings true still.

There is a detailed realistic set by Michael Hankin and Jeremy Allen. It is panelled in old wood and cluttered with the detritus of long lives and an even longer night in which those lives become unravelled as secrets are brought to light.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. By Edward Albee. Ensemble Theatre, Sydney. May 18. Tickets: $42-$71. Bookings: [phone] or online. Duration: 3 hrs including interval. Until June 18.